Is scale off in 2.1? Everything feels smaller.

[eobet]

I have not played much Elite Dangerous, but first time I tried it on the HTC Vive a month or so ago, I remember thinking that the space cockpit and stations were huge (the planets felt too small, though, as did the "painted on" galaxy).

But now with 2.1, I noticed that something was "off". Stations no longer feels as big, but that can be subjective. What isn't subjective however, is the size of the virtual body and joystick in the game. They are too small! I'm a skinny guy, but I'm not anorexic, which is what the pilot in the game feels like.

I don't remember it being like this before the current patch.

 

[tempsgk]

Played before and after patch with a CV1, no changes really.

 

[xondk]

I have not played much Elite Dangerous, but first time I tried it on the HTC Vive a month or so ago, I remember thinking that the space cockpit and stations were huge (the planets felt too small, though, as did the "painted on" galaxy).

But now with 2.1, I noticed that something was "off". Stations no longer feels as big, but that can be subjective. What isn't subjective however, is the size of the virtual body and joystick in the game. They are too small! I'm a skinny guy, but I'm not anorexic, which is what the pilot in the game feels like.

I don't remember it being like this before the current patch.

Sounds like settings are off? have you done anything that might have reset settings? let another play with your vive or similar? while I do not have one, I believe someone has talked about a setting that if not right will cause scale to seem off?

 

[dogbite]

I have not played much Elite Dangerous, but first time I tried it on the HTC Vive a month or so ago, I remember thinking that the space cockpit and stations were huge (the planets felt too small, though, as did the "painted on" galaxy).

But now with 2.1, I noticed that something was "off". Stations no longer feels as big, but that can be subjective. What isn't subjective however, is the size of the virtual body and joystick in the game. They are too small! I'm a skinny guy, but I'm not anorexic, which is what the pilot in the game feels like.

I don't remember it being like this before the current patch.

You are not the only one to notice this. If you don't want to watch the entire hour, jump to the 24 min mark of this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agrc2OmAEYg&feature=youtu.be
It may well be that because the Frontier devs had access to Oculus hardware earlier that they just haven't fine tuned for the Vive yet. For all their similarities they are different and Ed isn't done fine tuning for either yet.

 

[eobet]

Sounds like settings are off? have you done anything that might have reset settings? let another play with your vive or similar? while I do not have one, I believe someone has talked about a setting that if not right will cause scale to seem off?

I have reset the graphics settings to default VR low, VR high and also custom, because I attempted to get superscaling x2 to work. But resetting settings should have reset any weird scale issue too, no? Also, I tried the FOV and 3D separation sliders, but they do not work with the Vive so there doesn't seem to be any settings that affects scale.

I'm a skinny guy, so I'm very surprised that no normally built people have reacted that the body is so thin and hands so small.

PS. No other VR game has changed scale, and the Vive controllers in the SteamVR lobby are the correct scale.

 

[CMDR FlashPan]

This is one of the first things I noticed too. My old body was quite a reasonable fit for my real body but the new one looks too small. I looked at the hands and had even thought I had accidently selected a female pilot, but that was not the case.

 

[CylonSurfer]

I've always found the scale to be off, ever since the game launched. With the DK2 there were ways to overcome the issue. Sadly the same is not true with the Vive or CV1, the game desperately needs a world scale slider option.

 

[Khaldur]

Scale in VR is a funny thing. The individual perception seems to vary greatly.

I personally didn't notice any difference at all with 2.1 (on Rift).

There are also some who claim they would see a difference in scale when changing the IPD settings. Others (including me) don't.

This is how I understand IPD and scale (corrections from real experts welcome):
There are 2 different IPD values playing a role here: The physical IPD and the virtual IPD.
The physical IPD is your actual inter-pupillary distance. The optics in your HMD need to be adjusted to match this IPD in order not to cause discomfort (eye strain, headache, double vision). That's what the slider on the Oculus Rift is doing. This should not automatically impact scale.

The virtual IPD is the one the graphics engine uses to render the 2 different images your each of your eyes. Ideally that one should match your real IPD. If not the scale will be off.
The question is now whether ED (and other VR games) query the IPD setting of the HMD in order to set the virtual IPD to the same value as it should be ideally done. I don't know if that is possible or whether the Oculus or Steam runtime automatically takes care of that. It doesn't seem to be the case because I don't see a change in scale when moving the IPD slider.
If the graphics engine uses a standard IPD then all who have a physical IPD that differs much from the average value (~64mm) will have scale issues.

 

[Skaldy]

Scale in VR is a funny thing. The individual perception seems to vary greatly.

I personally didn't notice any difference at all with 2.1 (on Rift).

There are also some who claim they would see a difference in scale when changing the IPD settings. Others (including me) don't.

This is how I understand IPD and scale (corrections from real experts welcome):
There are 2 different IPD values playing a role here: The physical IPD and the virtual IPD.
The physical IPD is your actual inter-pupillary distance. The optics in your HMD need to be adjusted to match this IPD in order not to cause discomfort (eye strain, headache, double vision). That's what the slider on the Oculus Rift is doing. This should not automatically impact scale.

The virtual IPD is the one the graphics engine uses to render the 2 different images your each of your eyes. Ideally that one should match your real IPD. If not the scale will be off.
The question is now whether ED (and other VR games) query the IPD setting of the HMD in order to set the virtual IPD to the same value as it should be ideally done. I don't know if that is possible or whether the Oculus or Steam runtime automatically takes care of that. It doesn't seem to be the case because I don't see a change in scale when moving the IPD slider.
If the graphics engine uses a standard IPD then all who have a physical IPD that differs much from the average value (~64mm) will have scale issues.

Most accurate post I've seen on IPD. Cheers.

 

[eobet]

Scale in VR is a funny thing. The individual perception seems to vary greatly.

I've never seen anyone complain about scale in other Vive games. There is no perception variation on the HTC Vive!

How can I be certain? Because quite a lot of games model the Vive Controllers in the game, and you can smack them together and stack them on top of each other (using that ring) and there's literally zero complaints that the scale is off anywhere, or that people see scale differently. I mean, that's the brilliance of VR compared to a regular monitor, which has different aspect ratios, sizes and FOV set by the user. There's none of that in VR, what you see is 1:1.

But that seems to be off in Elite, probably because it was developed before VR and perhaps not in a real world scale, and also perhaps because real world scale is probably impossible when it comes to the planets, due to the limitation of the data size of floating point numbers?

Either way, your body in 2.1 is too small, and probably other things as well.

 

[dogbite]

I've never seen anyone complain about scale in other Vive games. There is no perception variation on the HTC Vive!

How can I be certain? Because quite a lot of games model the Vive Controllers in the game, and you can smack them together and stack them on top of each other (using that ring) and there's literally zero complaints that the scale is off anywhere, or that people see scale differently. I mean, that's the brilliance of VR compared to a regular monitor, which has different aspect ratios, sizes and FOV set by the user. There's none of that in VR, what you see is 1:1.

But that seems to be off in Elite, probably because it was developed before VR and perhaps not in a real world scale, and also perhaps because real world scale is probably impossible when it comes to the planets, due to the limitation of the data size of floating point numbers?

Either way, your body in 2.1 is too small, and probably other things as well.

UKRifter did indeed notice it in other games (25min mark) of video in my last post. Not everyone is going to notice this as we all see light frequency differently and we aren't all going to compare 2 different HMD's. I recall seeing a comparison revue video where the guy felt the Vive scale was more natural. No wrong here though, just everybody's different. Kinda stresses the importance of "try before you buy" if your worried. Most people don't seem to notice at all.

 

[grodenglaive]

Scale in VR is a funny thing. The individual perception seems to vary greatly.

I personally didn't notice any difference at all with 2.1 (on Rift).

There are also some who claim they would see a difference in scale when changing the IPD settings. Others (including me) don't.

This is how I understand IPD and scale (corrections from real experts welcome):
There are 2 different IPD values playing a role here: The physical IPD and the virtual IPD.
The physical IPD is your actual inter-pupillary distance. The optics in your HMD need to be adjusted to match this IPD in order not to cause discomfort (eye strain, headache, double vision). That's what the slider on the Oculus Rift is doing. This should not automatically impact scale.

The virtual IPD is the one the graphics engine uses to render the 2 different images your each of your eyes. Ideally that one should match your real IPD. If not the scale will be off.
The question is now whether ED (and other VR games) query the IPD setting of the HMD in order to set the virtual IPD to the same value as it should be ideally done. I don't know if that is possible or whether the Oculus or Steam runtime automatically takes care of that. It doesn't seem to be the case because I don't see a change in scale when moving the IPD slider.
If the graphics engine uses a standard IPD then all who have a physical IPD that differs much from the average value (~64mm) will have scale issues.

The game should read the IPD from the HMD, but that hasn't always the case. ED had that exact problem with the DK2 a year ago. The scale was fine and adjusted according to your IPD, until one of the updates broke it and you were left with tiny avatar no matter what you did with your settings (actually my wife liked having the skinny legs, go figure).
I should mention you wouldn't notice there was a problem if you had an average ipd - it's the outliers that see when the game doesn't adjust accordingly (assuming the game is default at 64 mm).

 

[wstephenson]

Some great posts in this thread, thank you ladies and gentlemen.

Has anyone had an acknowledgement on this issue from QA? My avatar also seems about 75% scale to me.

 

[bitstorm]

Scale in VR is a funny thing. The individual perception seems to vary greatly.

I personally didn't notice any difference at all with 2.1 (on Rift).

There are also some who claim they would see a difference in scale when changing the IPD settings. Others (including me) don't.

This is how I understand IPD and scale (corrections from real experts welcome):
There are 2 different IPD values playing a role here: The physical IPD and the virtual IPD.
The physical IPD is your actual inter-pupillary distance. The optics in your HMD need to be adjusted to match this IPD in order not to cause discomfort (eye strain, headache, double vision). That's what the slider on the Oculus Rift is doing. This should not automatically impact scale.

The virtual IPD is the one the graphics engine uses to render the 2 different images your each of your eyes. Ideally that one should match your real IPD. If not the scale will be off.
The question is now whether ED (and other VR games) query the IPD setting of the HMD in order to set the virtual IPD to the same value as it should be ideally done. I don't know if that is possible or whether the Oculus or Steam runtime automatically takes care of that. It doesn't seem to be the case because I don't see a change in scale when moving the IPD slider.
If the graphics engine uses a standard IPD then all who have a physical IPD that differs much from the average value (~64mm) will have scale issues.

Fascinating stuff. I vaguely knew of this but it's great to hear it being talked about.

I'm wondering, given a (presumed) static virtual IPD (say 64mm), does anyone know how an image would vary given a variable physical IPD (PIPD)?

I find this really hard to think about myself, but say your PIPD is less than the VIPD, what happens? How does that manifest when viewing an image? And also what if PIPD > VIPD, how does that manifest?

 

[Khaldur]

Nice article to read about this topic. Very informative and easy to understand:
http://kholdstare.github.io/technical/2013/10/06/sense-of-scale-vr.html

 

[pipper]

As I tried to explain here , maybe this is partly due to a bug in Vive's OpenVR SDK.
If things that are supposed to be at far distance or infinity do not match exactly in the rendered image, it might cause the brain to think things are closer than they should be.
On top, if the rendering of things at distance does not match, their (anti) aliasing will look different, too (due to different rasterization), which will cause even more confusion to the brain.
I noticed that space stations look especially bad from outside as they show a lot of aliasing around lights and highlights.

When looking at Valve's demos, you'll see that they carefully tried to avoid all the artifacts we notice in ED: They use high MSAA settings. Their colors are not as saturated, the contrast is kinda low and they have almost
no highly specular materials (no 'sparkly surfaces).